We keep hearing that this is the age of rapid urbanization: By 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. But in the United States, the people moving into those cities are largely rich, white, and childless. What’s more, not as many of them are moving as they were a few years ago.

Since 1988, the population along China’s Pearl River Delta has grown by a whopping 32 million people. Now boasting a total population of 42 million, it’s the largest urban area on the planet. To put it into perspective, 42 million people is more than the population of Canada, Australia, or Argentina.

From coyotes camping out in Queens bars to giant snails eating houses in Florida to llamas roaming the streets of Phoenix, there’s no shortage of sensational news featuring wild animals infiltrating our cities. But these brilliant ever-adapting creatures are also finding new ways to live among us humans, and some…

Photographer Samuel Peck recently visited Yunnan, China to capture images of its paddy fields. The region's vast swaths of flooded, arable land are among the largest and most scenic on Earth. When he arrived, however, Peck learned of their rapid disappearance – a vanishing act spurred by aggressive urbanization and a…

This week, Chinese authorities published the results of a long-delayed blueprint for how it will grow its cities—and its economy—by 2020. The plan is sweeping, ambitious, and dense, and it gives us a glimpse of China's future.

The "smart city" might not be so smart, and gentrification might not be so bad. Plus a sad story about how urban development is destroying Chinese villages—300 of them per day. This is our weekly look at What's Ruining Our Cities.

Phoenix, Arizona, is a famously fast-growing city. But, instead of growing up, the city has almost uniformly grown out, with terracotta-tiled subdivisions consuming the adjacent desert at a frightening rate: some estimates claim its suburbs grew an acre per hour during the early 2000s housing boom.

As more and more ozone depleting humans start crowding together, we're going to eventually stain the entire world with concrete streets and flickering street lights. Mountains are going to glow like man-made volcanoes, rivers are going to become brown sludge and new urban cities will be carved into whatever is left of…

A group called 19.20.21 has just launched a five-year study of "supercities" with populations over 20 million. They'll look at how nineteen cities that have reached this "tipping point" population suddenly change: everything from waste management and water use, to art and crime patterns are affected. The group will…